Poop and politics: waste management beyond the technocratic
Introduction
The typical sewer system: Waste water is gathered from nearly every building in some demarcated space and sent through a series of tunnels and pipes to a treatment facility, where the bacteria-ridden sewage is cleaned and made safe for dumping into natural bodies of water. A system like this is easy to take for granted as a technical necessity. After all, accumulated human feces can facilitate the spread of disease, especially in dense, urban environments. It seems a no-brainer to many that such an accumulation is unacceptable, that it’s the state’s responsibility to manage human waste, and that a sewer system takes the form it does merely because it must – according to non-negotiable science and technical reality.
But despite the views of early modernists and urban planners, waste infrastructure has no obvious, inevitable form. Nor can the technical project of waste management be divorced from the abstractions of politics and ideology. This work will discuss two types of waste management – on-site sanitation system and sewer system – and give an overview of the social, spatial, and political implications of each paradigm. What we find is that waste management is a useful vantage point for understanding the waste of capitalist consumption, teasing out different paradigms of civil virtue, and thinking deeply about the right to the city.
The Apolitical Myth
In many ways it may be expected that sewer systems – both their presence and the way they deal with waste – are taken for granted. For one, they are buried beneath the ground. And in a world were parks, freeways, and skyscrapers – all fascinating from the perspective of critical urban theory – are taken for granted despite their striking visibility, it’s no surprise that sewers garner limited thought and attention. In all likelihood, the average person only thinks about sewers when they malfunction and cause inconvenience. In that way, a sewer that invites thought (critical, technical, or otherwise) is a sewer that does not work properly.
We see, however, that more forces than science and engineering are at play in the conception, formation, and proliferation of sewer systems as a default mode of waste management. Understanding sewers requires understanding the politics, economics, socialization, and broader urban context that surrounds them.
Types of Waste Management
Though they tend to overshadow the political implications, understanding the technical workings and history of different waste management systems is an important step in uncovering their urban significance.
Cesspools (1)(2)
Cesspools can hardly be considered an invention – the process of hiding or storing waste in holes and pits probably predates recorded history. But they adopted a popularized and more politically important form in 16th century, when waste from humans and horses began to overwhelm the streets and gutters of London. By the 19th century, they were typically brick chambers beneath a privy or outhouse in the backyard, unless you lived in a denser, urban area. In that case, the cesspool would more likely be inside of your basement. These kinds of cesspools were often cleaned of solid waste (the liquid waste was meant to seep out through pores in the structure) with shovels and a carts as both a convenience and a source of fertilizer.
Before the proliferation of these cesspools, feces could be considered something of a pre-capitalist externality. A household would eat their own food, and the waste they’d produce would be dumped onto the public streets, exposing all passersby to the odor and bacteria. The individual consumed, and the public suffered. It is a configuration that mirrors present-day phenomena – though the effect is admittedly more communal and less based on class cleavages. A common example is a factory that produces high-end cars. The well-off consume these cars, but the air pollution from the factory primarily affects the working class industrial districts who do not partake in the product. The aggregate carbon emissions disproportionately impact those without the economic capital to relocate or the political capital to purify their own environments. Ultimately, the cost of waste is absorbed even by those who don’t consume, and is often deliberately exported.
But that is a story of capitalism. The important thing about the spatial configuration of cesspools – always in proximity to the home, almost always sized for individual households – is that it is decidedly pre-capitalist. The waste is stored or disposed of within the boundaries of the consumption that brought it forth. This system of waste management is decentralized, and the household has much more of a role in maintaining it than any governing body.
The politics of further developments (3)(4)(5)(6)
Developments in waste management infrastructure are fundamentally spatial corollaries to urbanization and ideological corollaries to the modern. Much of 17th century America had few cesspools at all; waste was discharged from a privy to “the yard, street, gutter, or open channel.” But of course, urban development and increasing density made this practice unacceptable, assuming the goal was to prevent similarly high densities of waste. It is no surprise that as urban residential areas became denser and more complex, waste management methods would become more centralized.
These developments must also be understood in the context of the modern, beyond an increased technological capacity and understanding of bacteria. Modernist ideology entails the practice of optimization, the transcendence of mere survival, and the “technological sublime.” Urban environments under modernist ideology have a cultivated freedom from fragmentation, chaos, disorder, disease, general uncleanliness, and other primitive, uncivilized afflictions. Accumulated human waste is an urban reality that exemplifies all of the aforementioned.
For one, what must be taken seriously in any critical reading of sanitation is that organic waste has a stench that defies hyperbole. Late 19th century Baltimore was described by H. L. Mencken as smelling “like a billion polecats,” and the scent that overwhelms crowded streets or permeates private homes undoubtedly contributed to a culture especially squeamish about poop. It was nuisance as much as toxicity – nuisance that no one with the rights and means should have to tolerate.
An important example of this – the dry sewage method of waste management from 17th century America – is evidence that this ideological aversion to nuisance had the potential to extend beyond public, urbanizing space and into the household. The dry sewage method “entailed placing containers beneath the seats of privies to collect human excrement,” which would require those responsible to carry and empty the container into a delegated location. On the one hand, the idea of freedom from nuisance is demonstrated by the presence of a designated space away from the home and privy at which the proximate can dispose of their waste. The method moved beyond externality and somewhat beyond personal absorption of waste to a preliminary system of purification. In this way it was a relatively centralized, though technologically inadequate, manifestation of very early urbanism and modernist sentiment. But there is also something to be said about the rhetoric against the method. The process of retaining excrement in such a small space, as well as the process of removing it, were nuisances in and of themselves. These considerably early inklings of modernism make it clear that only something more centralized and less difficult would satisfy the project.
It is also worth pointing out that chaos, disorder, and barbarism could also be considered problematic aspect of unmanaged waste. For one, among the dictionary definitions of cesspool is “any place of moral filth or immorality.” The term itself now connotes general corruption and abstract uncleanliness. How fitting, then, that sewer networks became a favorite of “urban engineers with the moral power to bring sanitation, cleanliness, rationality, and order to the troubled and apparently chaotic industrial metropolis.” Accumulated waste can also conjure images of medieval plagues facilitated by a primitive dearth of hygiene. Waste infrastructure technology would be, then, a medium by which we progressed beyond the inferior civilizations of the past.
Rhode Island waste management(7)(8)(9)
A recent controversy in Rhode Island over the prevalence of outdated cesspools and their effect on groundwater and Narragansett Bay is a useful example of the aforementioned, as well as a good vantage point from which to see the effect of competitive economic concerns on waste management. The context is that Save the Bay, an environmental protection organization focused on Narragansett Bay, as well as other interested parties, have compiled information blaming bay pollution in part on the 25,000-50,000 cesspools in RI. Ultimately, a bill was passed requiring that cesspools be disconnected within 12 months of the sale of a property.
In Joe Paliotta’s “Cesspools are not problem in R.I.,” he points out the incapacity of RI waste treatment plants to properly treat sewage after a certain rain threshold. Recognizing the issue, the city introduced a multi-phase septic tank plan to contain the overflow into Narragansett bay, the first phase of which had a cost of about $350 million. In addition, those with cesspools had to spend $25,000-$40,000 to install septic tanks or connect to sewer lines. Too often forgotten is that one entity’s cost is another entity’s revenue. There are bodies beyond Save the Bay and the cohort of concerned citizens with a financial interest in these reforms, a fact which almost certainly lubricated the legislative process.
If nothing else, an un-polluted body of water is more pleasant to visit and safer to swim in. RI, the Ocean State, certainly has a tourism interest in purifying the Bay even at the substantial cost to those purchasing homes with cesspools. Commercial fishing also occurs in the Bay when recent sewage overflows have not made the activity dangerous. This is yet another economic interest. What is clear from the economic factors alone is that the improvement and proliferation of RI sewer systems and the decisive ban on cesspools is not simply a matter of technical necessity or inevitable progress. It is also worth mentioning that economic interests can go the other way as well; Joe Paliotta in particular is a Rhode Island real-estate broker. Given that the ban imposes costs on home buyers that don’t translate to profits for property owners, he has an occupational interest in defending cesspools. This interconnected contestation of something as taken for granted as waste disposal is a perfect example of the economic, competition-driven creation of the urban environment's skin and skeleton.
More abstract and seemingly unrelated forces are at play as well in this controversy; Save the Bay’s information page on cesspools in RI reveals quite a bit about the modernist and somewhat neoliberal values that inform their position. For one, the caption of the page’s cesspool diagram reads “The primitive cesspool – a 55-gallon drum with holes in its sides – is a danger to public health.” The following paragraph includes sentences like “If the thought of flushing your toilet into a hole in the yard seems primitive, it is,” and “Most Southern New England cesspools have been around more than half a century and many are simply a joke.” The language is a clear appeal to modernist rationality and the ideology of the technological sublime. That it’s even included in a section of the page that already makes the potential public health risks clear is quite telling of the effect normative ideologies of excrement and infrastructure have on waste management.
Furthermore, the page includes a section titled “’Not in Our Backyards’ – Meet Rhode Island Residents who cleaned up their act for the health of the Bay.” This is language that links waste management to moral character (“cleaned up their act”) and an apparently lauded sense of duty and political assertiveness. Perhaps this particular example is on the more blatant end of some spectrum, but regardless, it demonstrates that even waste management infrastructure (particularly the transition from decentralized, private responsibility strategies to centralized, publicly regulated strategies) is not immune to influence from politics, economics (beyond analysis of cost-effectiveness), morality, abstract idealism, etc.
Theoretical Implications of Different Methods
Political characteristics
Of course, that infrastructure is contorted by non-technical forces is not the only conclusion to be made when analyzing the differences between cesspools (and other on-site sanitation systems) and sewer networks. In many ways the dichotomy parallels discourse about different political paradigms and ideal worlds.
As mentioned, cesspools seem to hearken back to a pre-state, pre-capitalist configuration of consumption – and perhaps even production. Again, the waste is stored in proximity to the consumption, or at least the consumer, that produced it. The owner of the cesspool is responsible for its maintenance – no easy task, but it represents a freedom to regulate one’s waste as they see fit. In a vacuum, no externalities are possible. If inadequate maintenance leaves anyone’s groundwater contaminated, the contaminator is theoretically the only one who suffers (for example, if you have both a personal well and a cesspool). Contrast this with a sewer system where, if a treatment plant isn’t working properly (if there even is one) a communal water source could be affected. They are conservative in a sort of personal responsibility, decentralization, small-government sense.
This is not to suggest that the technologically base nature of may cesspools is necessarily a part of that conservatism. Septic tanks have most of the same spatial and political characteristics as cesspools do. But they also contain an environment for bacteria to separate the solid and liquid waste, draining the now safe liquid into a drain field or leaching pool. Depending on how remote the residence, a septic tank could potentially be more convenient and more practical than a sewer connection – all while maintaining the management freedom of the owner.
Sewer networks are in many ways opposite. Rather than a sanitation apparatus one installs for themselves, a sewer connection is a buy-in to a structurally managed system. The network is centralized while also connecting the often diverse and disparate parts of a city. An individual sewer network only covers a limited, demarcated area, tacitly suggesting that said area (a city or town, perhaps) is a valid, legitimate, and complete unit. They conceptually depend on the city and, by their existence, reinforce that concept, connecting different households to create a sort of state-supervised solidarity. They are also rational, valuing flexibility and freedom of regulation beneath efficiency, predictability, standardization, and control. Sewer systems are both more urban and more modern than cesspools and septic tanks.
Further exploration of the dichotomy
So, from a critical standpoint, any debate between sewer systems and cesspools is not merely a debate about what’s more practical and cost-effective for a given residence configuration. It’s a debate between rural and urban. Given its characteristics, a cesspool is analogous to subsistence farming while a sewer system is analogous to travelling to a city to seek factory work. As silly as it may seem, cesspools carry an element of countryside nostalgia and control of one’s own destiny. Sewers, however, evoke cohesion, structure, and superior capacity.
It’s also a debate about centralization, as well as personal responsibility and delegation (to a collective or government). A cesspool or septic tank implies a greater degree of individual control and range of motion. Because one’s cesspool belongs only to their personal household, they need only depend on their own ability to administer or purchase the proper maintenance. Should an individual be capable enough in this regard, they need not worry about the incompetence, negligence, or stubbornness of others compromising their own ability to manage their waste. No individual can control their stake in the sewer, by contrast. Everyone in their network has their sewage sent to the same treatment plant, which has its own central and consistent standards for functioning, output, and sanitation. If any individual wishes to change this, they must approach from a collective and/or angle. This slows the process, but could be considered a safeguard against incompetence and recklessness. That is especially important considering not everyone can be capable of properly handling their own waste management system and because the costs of a sewer system are collectively absorbed.
Finally, it’s a debate between two different moral principles vis-à-vis the state. Cesspools are mostly self-regarding. The individual absorbs virtually all the consequences for a cesspool that collapses or clogs. And when they aren’t self-regarding (like when they leach into bodies of water), the individual can choose to ignore the consequences or engage some collective will in mitigating their externalities. In this view, it is the duty of the state and/or collective to avoid demanding participation or tribute from the individual. Participation is voluntary. Sewers, however, compose a constructed collective. If a part of it bursts or malfunctions, it must be repaired with public funds. That means those participating in the collective may incur costs on behalf of others’ consumption or mistakes. But on the other hand, there is a guarantee of collective action on their behalf should such a situation arise. Overall, each method has its political pros and cons.
Conclusion
The right to the city was succinctly defined by David Harvey as “a right of access to what already exists, [and] a right to change it after our heart’s desire.” (10) Though cesspools aren’t quite as romantic, it is clear that they are far more in line with a right to the city than the rigid and centralized sewer system. However, we cannot ignore the political benefits of a sewer system based on this imperfect parallel. For example, though cesspools are more “free,” they are considerably less equitable. Not everyone will have the same resources or know-how to properly maintain their cesspool. And though on-site sanitation might work in a rural or suburban area where there is plenty of space for each household to have an individual unit, a septic tank system for a dense apartment complex could quickly become incredibly expensive and impractical. The cost of universal on-site sanitation would disproportionately fall on the underprivileged, taking away resources they could use to exert their free will on the rest of the city.
What is more indicative of a right to the city than a cesspool requirement – which is essentially compulsory exercise of individual responsibility – is an ability to choose which waste sanitation system best fits your individual needs. Perhaps knowing your waste is being taken care of somewhere far away from your home is more important to you than your ability to choose what happens to it. Being deprived of sewer access in that case would be in “violation” of your right to the city; the point is to open avenues for qualitative change in the urban, not to merely symbolize individualism and decentralization.
Infrastructure is the skeleton of the city, and as such it must be constant to some degree lest it be rendered totally ineffective. Because of this, it is difficult to envision what a consensual, contested infrastructure would look like, especially in waste disposal. Nevertheless, sewer networks should not be taken for granted simply because they make all of our lives healthier and more pleasant. And if our ultimate conclusion given the political implications of sewers is to continue phasing out cesspools, so be it.
The typical sewer system: Waste water is gathered from nearly every building in some demarcated space and sent through a series of tunnels and pipes to a treatment facility, where the bacteria-ridden sewage is cleaned and made safe for dumping into natural bodies of water. A system like this is easy to take for granted as a technical necessity. After all, accumulated human feces can facilitate the spread of disease, especially in dense, urban environments. It seems a no-brainer to many that such an accumulation is unacceptable, that it’s the state’s responsibility to manage human waste, and that a sewer system takes the form it does merely because it must – according to non-negotiable science and technical reality.
But despite the views of early modernists and urban planners, waste infrastructure has no obvious, inevitable form. Nor can the technical project of waste management be divorced from the abstractions of politics and ideology. This work will discuss two types of waste management – on-site sanitation system and sewer system – and give an overview of the social, spatial, and political implications of each paradigm. What we find is that waste management is a useful vantage point for understanding the waste of capitalist consumption, teasing out different paradigms of civil virtue, and thinking deeply about the right to the city.
The Apolitical Myth
In many ways it may be expected that sewer systems – both their presence and the way they deal with waste – are taken for granted. For one, they are buried beneath the ground. And in a world were parks, freeways, and skyscrapers – all fascinating from the perspective of critical urban theory – are taken for granted despite their striking visibility, it’s no surprise that sewers garner limited thought and attention. In all likelihood, the average person only thinks about sewers when they malfunction and cause inconvenience. In that way, a sewer that invites thought (critical, technical, or otherwise) is a sewer that does not work properly.
We see, however, that more forces than science and engineering are at play in the conception, formation, and proliferation of sewer systems as a default mode of waste management. Understanding sewers requires understanding the politics, economics, socialization, and broader urban context that surrounds them.
Types of Waste Management
Though they tend to overshadow the political implications, understanding the technical workings and history of different waste management systems is an important step in uncovering their urban significance.
Cesspools (1)(2)
Cesspools can hardly be considered an invention – the process of hiding or storing waste in holes and pits probably predates recorded history. But they adopted a popularized and more politically important form in 16th century, when waste from humans and horses began to overwhelm the streets and gutters of London. By the 19th century, they were typically brick chambers beneath a privy or outhouse in the backyard, unless you lived in a denser, urban area. In that case, the cesspool would more likely be inside of your basement. These kinds of cesspools were often cleaned of solid waste (the liquid waste was meant to seep out through pores in the structure) with shovels and a carts as both a convenience and a source of fertilizer.
Before the proliferation of these cesspools, feces could be considered something of a pre-capitalist externality. A household would eat their own food, and the waste they’d produce would be dumped onto the public streets, exposing all passersby to the odor and bacteria. The individual consumed, and the public suffered. It is a configuration that mirrors present-day phenomena – though the effect is admittedly more communal and less based on class cleavages. A common example is a factory that produces high-end cars. The well-off consume these cars, but the air pollution from the factory primarily affects the working class industrial districts who do not partake in the product. The aggregate carbon emissions disproportionately impact those without the economic capital to relocate or the political capital to purify their own environments. Ultimately, the cost of waste is absorbed even by those who don’t consume, and is often deliberately exported.
But that is a story of capitalism. The important thing about the spatial configuration of cesspools – always in proximity to the home, almost always sized for individual households – is that it is decidedly pre-capitalist. The waste is stored or disposed of within the boundaries of the consumption that brought it forth. This system of waste management is decentralized, and the household has much more of a role in maintaining it than any governing body.
The politics of further developments (3)(4)(5)(6)
Developments in waste management infrastructure are fundamentally spatial corollaries to urbanization and ideological corollaries to the modern. Much of 17th century America had few cesspools at all; waste was discharged from a privy to “the yard, street, gutter, or open channel.” But of course, urban development and increasing density made this practice unacceptable, assuming the goal was to prevent similarly high densities of waste. It is no surprise that as urban residential areas became denser and more complex, waste management methods would become more centralized.
These developments must also be understood in the context of the modern, beyond an increased technological capacity and understanding of bacteria. Modernist ideology entails the practice of optimization, the transcendence of mere survival, and the “technological sublime.” Urban environments under modernist ideology have a cultivated freedom from fragmentation, chaos, disorder, disease, general uncleanliness, and other primitive, uncivilized afflictions. Accumulated human waste is an urban reality that exemplifies all of the aforementioned.
For one, what must be taken seriously in any critical reading of sanitation is that organic waste has a stench that defies hyperbole. Late 19th century Baltimore was described by H. L. Mencken as smelling “like a billion polecats,” and the scent that overwhelms crowded streets or permeates private homes undoubtedly contributed to a culture especially squeamish about poop. It was nuisance as much as toxicity – nuisance that no one with the rights and means should have to tolerate.
An important example of this – the dry sewage method of waste management from 17th century America – is evidence that this ideological aversion to nuisance had the potential to extend beyond public, urbanizing space and into the household. The dry sewage method “entailed placing containers beneath the seats of privies to collect human excrement,” which would require those responsible to carry and empty the container into a delegated location. On the one hand, the idea of freedom from nuisance is demonstrated by the presence of a designated space away from the home and privy at which the proximate can dispose of their waste. The method moved beyond externality and somewhat beyond personal absorption of waste to a preliminary system of purification. In this way it was a relatively centralized, though technologically inadequate, manifestation of very early urbanism and modernist sentiment. But there is also something to be said about the rhetoric against the method. The process of retaining excrement in such a small space, as well as the process of removing it, were nuisances in and of themselves. These considerably early inklings of modernism make it clear that only something more centralized and less difficult would satisfy the project.
It is also worth pointing out that chaos, disorder, and barbarism could also be considered problematic aspect of unmanaged waste. For one, among the dictionary definitions of cesspool is “any place of moral filth or immorality.” The term itself now connotes general corruption and abstract uncleanliness. How fitting, then, that sewer networks became a favorite of “urban engineers with the moral power to bring sanitation, cleanliness, rationality, and order to the troubled and apparently chaotic industrial metropolis.” Accumulated waste can also conjure images of medieval plagues facilitated by a primitive dearth of hygiene. Waste infrastructure technology would be, then, a medium by which we progressed beyond the inferior civilizations of the past.
Rhode Island waste management(7)(8)(9)
A recent controversy in Rhode Island over the prevalence of outdated cesspools and their effect on groundwater and Narragansett Bay is a useful example of the aforementioned, as well as a good vantage point from which to see the effect of competitive economic concerns on waste management. The context is that Save the Bay, an environmental protection organization focused on Narragansett Bay, as well as other interested parties, have compiled information blaming bay pollution in part on the 25,000-50,000 cesspools in RI. Ultimately, a bill was passed requiring that cesspools be disconnected within 12 months of the sale of a property.
In Joe Paliotta’s “Cesspools are not problem in R.I.,” he points out the incapacity of RI waste treatment plants to properly treat sewage after a certain rain threshold. Recognizing the issue, the city introduced a multi-phase septic tank plan to contain the overflow into Narragansett bay, the first phase of which had a cost of about $350 million. In addition, those with cesspools had to spend $25,000-$40,000 to install septic tanks or connect to sewer lines. Too often forgotten is that one entity’s cost is another entity’s revenue. There are bodies beyond Save the Bay and the cohort of concerned citizens with a financial interest in these reforms, a fact which almost certainly lubricated the legislative process.
If nothing else, an un-polluted body of water is more pleasant to visit and safer to swim in. RI, the Ocean State, certainly has a tourism interest in purifying the Bay even at the substantial cost to those purchasing homes with cesspools. Commercial fishing also occurs in the Bay when recent sewage overflows have not made the activity dangerous. This is yet another economic interest. What is clear from the economic factors alone is that the improvement and proliferation of RI sewer systems and the decisive ban on cesspools is not simply a matter of technical necessity or inevitable progress. It is also worth mentioning that economic interests can go the other way as well; Joe Paliotta in particular is a Rhode Island real-estate broker. Given that the ban imposes costs on home buyers that don’t translate to profits for property owners, he has an occupational interest in defending cesspools. This interconnected contestation of something as taken for granted as waste disposal is a perfect example of the economic, competition-driven creation of the urban environment's skin and skeleton.
More abstract and seemingly unrelated forces are at play as well in this controversy; Save the Bay’s information page on cesspools in RI reveals quite a bit about the modernist and somewhat neoliberal values that inform their position. For one, the caption of the page’s cesspool diagram reads “The primitive cesspool – a 55-gallon drum with holes in its sides – is a danger to public health.” The following paragraph includes sentences like “If the thought of flushing your toilet into a hole in the yard seems primitive, it is,” and “Most Southern New England cesspools have been around more than half a century and many are simply a joke.” The language is a clear appeal to modernist rationality and the ideology of the technological sublime. That it’s even included in a section of the page that already makes the potential public health risks clear is quite telling of the effect normative ideologies of excrement and infrastructure have on waste management.
Furthermore, the page includes a section titled “’Not in Our Backyards’ – Meet Rhode Island Residents who cleaned up their act for the health of the Bay.” This is language that links waste management to moral character (“cleaned up their act”) and an apparently lauded sense of duty and political assertiveness. Perhaps this particular example is on the more blatant end of some spectrum, but regardless, it demonstrates that even waste management infrastructure (particularly the transition from decentralized, private responsibility strategies to centralized, publicly regulated strategies) is not immune to influence from politics, economics (beyond analysis of cost-effectiveness), morality, abstract idealism, etc.
Theoretical Implications of Different Methods
Political characteristics
Of course, that infrastructure is contorted by non-technical forces is not the only conclusion to be made when analyzing the differences between cesspools (and other on-site sanitation systems) and sewer networks. In many ways the dichotomy parallels discourse about different political paradigms and ideal worlds.
As mentioned, cesspools seem to hearken back to a pre-state, pre-capitalist configuration of consumption – and perhaps even production. Again, the waste is stored in proximity to the consumption, or at least the consumer, that produced it. The owner of the cesspool is responsible for its maintenance – no easy task, but it represents a freedom to regulate one’s waste as they see fit. In a vacuum, no externalities are possible. If inadequate maintenance leaves anyone’s groundwater contaminated, the contaminator is theoretically the only one who suffers (for example, if you have both a personal well and a cesspool). Contrast this with a sewer system where, if a treatment plant isn’t working properly (if there even is one) a communal water source could be affected. They are conservative in a sort of personal responsibility, decentralization, small-government sense.
This is not to suggest that the technologically base nature of may cesspools is necessarily a part of that conservatism. Septic tanks have most of the same spatial and political characteristics as cesspools do. But they also contain an environment for bacteria to separate the solid and liquid waste, draining the now safe liquid into a drain field or leaching pool. Depending on how remote the residence, a septic tank could potentially be more convenient and more practical than a sewer connection – all while maintaining the management freedom of the owner.
Sewer networks are in many ways opposite. Rather than a sanitation apparatus one installs for themselves, a sewer connection is a buy-in to a structurally managed system. The network is centralized while also connecting the often diverse and disparate parts of a city. An individual sewer network only covers a limited, demarcated area, tacitly suggesting that said area (a city or town, perhaps) is a valid, legitimate, and complete unit. They conceptually depend on the city and, by their existence, reinforce that concept, connecting different households to create a sort of state-supervised solidarity. They are also rational, valuing flexibility and freedom of regulation beneath efficiency, predictability, standardization, and control. Sewer systems are both more urban and more modern than cesspools and septic tanks.
Further exploration of the dichotomy
So, from a critical standpoint, any debate between sewer systems and cesspools is not merely a debate about what’s more practical and cost-effective for a given residence configuration. It’s a debate between rural and urban. Given its characteristics, a cesspool is analogous to subsistence farming while a sewer system is analogous to travelling to a city to seek factory work. As silly as it may seem, cesspools carry an element of countryside nostalgia and control of one’s own destiny. Sewers, however, evoke cohesion, structure, and superior capacity.
It’s also a debate about centralization, as well as personal responsibility and delegation (to a collective or government). A cesspool or septic tank implies a greater degree of individual control and range of motion. Because one’s cesspool belongs only to their personal household, they need only depend on their own ability to administer or purchase the proper maintenance. Should an individual be capable enough in this regard, they need not worry about the incompetence, negligence, or stubbornness of others compromising their own ability to manage their waste. No individual can control their stake in the sewer, by contrast. Everyone in their network has their sewage sent to the same treatment plant, which has its own central and consistent standards for functioning, output, and sanitation. If any individual wishes to change this, they must approach from a collective and/or angle. This slows the process, but could be considered a safeguard against incompetence and recklessness. That is especially important considering not everyone can be capable of properly handling their own waste management system and because the costs of a sewer system are collectively absorbed.
Finally, it’s a debate between two different moral principles vis-à-vis the state. Cesspools are mostly self-regarding. The individual absorbs virtually all the consequences for a cesspool that collapses or clogs. And when they aren’t self-regarding (like when they leach into bodies of water), the individual can choose to ignore the consequences or engage some collective will in mitigating their externalities. In this view, it is the duty of the state and/or collective to avoid demanding participation or tribute from the individual. Participation is voluntary. Sewers, however, compose a constructed collective. If a part of it bursts or malfunctions, it must be repaired with public funds. That means those participating in the collective may incur costs on behalf of others’ consumption or mistakes. But on the other hand, there is a guarantee of collective action on their behalf should such a situation arise. Overall, each method has its political pros and cons.
Conclusion
The right to the city was succinctly defined by David Harvey as “a right of access to what already exists, [and] a right to change it after our heart’s desire.” (10) Though cesspools aren’t quite as romantic, it is clear that they are far more in line with a right to the city than the rigid and centralized sewer system. However, we cannot ignore the political benefits of a sewer system based on this imperfect parallel. For example, though cesspools are more “free,” they are considerably less equitable. Not everyone will have the same resources or know-how to properly maintain their cesspool. And though on-site sanitation might work in a rural or suburban area where there is plenty of space for each household to have an individual unit, a septic tank system for a dense apartment complex could quickly become incredibly expensive and impractical. The cost of universal on-site sanitation would disproportionately fall on the underprivileged, taking away resources they could use to exert their free will on the rest of the city.
What is more indicative of a right to the city than a cesspool requirement – which is essentially compulsory exercise of individual responsibility – is an ability to choose which waste sanitation system best fits your individual needs. Perhaps knowing your waste is being taken care of somewhere far away from your home is more important to you than your ability to choose what happens to it. Being deprived of sewer access in that case would be in “violation” of your right to the city; the point is to open avenues for qualitative change in the urban, not to merely symbolize individualism and decentralization.
Infrastructure is the skeleton of the city, and as such it must be constant to some degree lest it be rendered totally ineffective. Because of this, it is difficult to envision what a consensual, contested infrastructure would look like, especially in waste disposal. Nevertheless, sewer networks should not be taken for granted simply because they make all of our lives healthier and more pleasant. And if our ultimate conclusion given the political implications of sewers is to continue phasing out cesspools, so be it.
Notes:
(1) La Berge, Ann Elizabeth Fowler. Mission and Method: The Early Nineteenth-Century French Public Health Movement. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
(2) "Author Interviews: 'Dirty Old London': A History Of The Victorians' Infamous Filth." National Public Radio 2015. Author: Lee Jackson. http://www.npr.org/2015/03/12/392332431/dirty-old-london-a-history-of-the-victorians-infamous-filth
(3) Burian, Steven J. et al. "Urban Wastewater Management in the United States: Past, Present, and Future." Journal of Urban Technology 7 (2000): 33-62.
(4) Graham, Stephen and Marvin, Simon. Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities, and the Urban Condition. London: Rutledge, 2001. 44-54.
(5) Corbett, Christopher. "The 'Charm City' Of H. L. Mencken." New York Times, September 4, 1988. http://www.nytimes.com/1988/09/04/travel/the-charm-city-of-h-l-mencken.html?pagewanted=all
(6) Definition from Dictionary.com.
(7) Salit, Richard. "Cesspool ban a win for Rhode Island's waters." Providence Journal, July 22, 2015. http://www.providencejournal.com/article/20150722/NEWS/150729717/0/SEARCH/?Start=1
(8) Paliotta, Joe. "Cesspools are no problem in R.I." Providence Journal, September 18, 2015. http://www.providencejournal.com/article/20150918/OPINION/150919352/0/SEARCH/?Start=1
(9) "Cesspools in Rhode Island: What You Should Know." Save The Bay. http://www.savebay.org/page.aspx?pid=1750
(10) Harvey, David. "The Right to the City." International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 27 (2003): 939-941.
(1) La Berge, Ann Elizabeth Fowler. Mission and Method: The Early Nineteenth-Century French Public Health Movement. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
(2) "Author Interviews: 'Dirty Old London': A History Of The Victorians' Infamous Filth." National Public Radio 2015. Author: Lee Jackson. http://www.npr.org/2015/03/12/392332431/dirty-old-london-a-history-of-the-victorians-infamous-filth
(3) Burian, Steven J. et al. "Urban Wastewater Management in the United States: Past, Present, and Future." Journal of Urban Technology 7 (2000): 33-62.
(4) Graham, Stephen and Marvin, Simon. Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities, and the Urban Condition. London: Rutledge, 2001. 44-54.
(5) Corbett, Christopher. "The 'Charm City' Of H. L. Mencken." New York Times, September 4, 1988. http://www.nytimes.com/1988/09/04/travel/the-charm-city-of-h-l-mencken.html?pagewanted=all
(6) Definition from Dictionary.com.
(7) Salit, Richard. "Cesspool ban a win for Rhode Island's waters." Providence Journal, July 22, 2015. http://www.providencejournal.com/article/20150722/NEWS/150729717/0/SEARCH/?Start=1
(8) Paliotta, Joe. "Cesspools are no problem in R.I." Providence Journal, September 18, 2015. http://www.providencejournal.com/article/20150918/OPINION/150919352/0/SEARCH/?Start=1
(9) "Cesspools in Rhode Island: What You Should Know." Save The Bay. http://www.savebay.org/page.aspx?pid=1750
(10) Harvey, David. "The Right to the City." International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 27 (2003): 939-941.